B.E.F.: The Whole Story of the Bonus Army: With a foreword by Charles Sheehan-Miles

By W. W. Waters and William C. White

In the summer of 1932, General Douglas MacArthur led regular United States Army troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to evict more than ten thousand veterans of the Great War from the streets of Washington. This is the story of those veterans, told by one of their number. Walter W. Waters, a World War I Army sergeant, set out from Portland, Oregon with 300 other veterans in 1932 to petition Congress for early payment of the bonus promised to veterans of the World War. With the Great Depression at its height, these men crossed the county on freight trains, then lived in shacks and abandoned buildings in Washington while seeking to improve their circumstances. This is their story, told by one of their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cincinnatus Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781632020109

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B.E.F.

THE WHOLE STORY

OF THE BONUS ARMY

W.W. Waters

as told to William C. White

Cincinnatus Press

Cary, North Carolina

More information

Please visit www.bonusmarch.info for original documents, photos and other information about the Bonus March.

Introduction © 2007 Cincinnatus Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cincinnatus Press has conducted a thorough copyright review and determined that the primary text of this book lies in the public domain. Original copyright 1933 by W.W. Waters and William C. White and printed by the John Day Company, Inc. New York 1933.  Reprinted 1969 by Arno Press and the New York Times.

Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-9794114-5-8

Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-9794114-6-5

E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-9794114-7-2

Printed in the United States of America

Cincinnatus Press

www.cincinnatuspress.com

Foreword

Not long after I returned from Iraq in 1991, I became heavily involved in veterans issues, particularly health issues related to Gulf War veterans who had been exposed to a variety of toxic substances during the war. Over the years after that, I heard many references to the Bonus Marchers of the Great Depression, but knew little about them.

Finally, in the late 1990s, I got my hands on a used copy of this book.  It had been out of print for more than thirty years at that time, I situation which I found somewhat depressing given the significant importance of the Bonus March in American history.

How different would all of our lives have been if President Hoover had not ordered the Army to forcefully evacuate Anacostia Flats? It is impossible to say for sure, but the distinct possibility exists that Hoover would have won re-election later that year, and Franklin D. Roosevelt may not have ever become President.  The later direction of our country—indeed, the world—might have been very different.

This is the story of the Bonus marchers written not by a scholar or government official, but by W. W. Waters, a World War I veteran who was a key organizer of the original group that left Oregon in the spring of 1932 and traveled across the country in order to petition Congress for redress. Waters spends much of his time in the book justifying his own actions at various points, and in several places takes a defensive tone. In some key points, his description differs from that of other contemporary accounts. All the same, the core events are here—the arrival of the bonus marchers in Washington, DC; the ambivalent relationship with DC Police Chief General Glassford; the accusations that the organizers were communists; and the final episode of that tragic summer, when General MacArthur led Regular Army troops into the streets of Washington, DC to evict peacefully protesting veterans of what was then known as the Great War.

At that time, the bonus march was the largest protest gathering that had ever taken place in Washington. Its importance in our history—both as a pivot on which turned the election of four-term President Roosevelt and as a example later followed by the Civil Rights movement, antiwar movements and many later organizing efforts—cannot be understated.

Because of all of these facts, I’m proud to be involved with reissuing a new edition of B.E.F. The True Story of the Bonus Army. If you are a student, or interested in learning more about both the history and the story of the bonus marchers, you are invited to visit www.bonusmarch.info, where we have posted original FBI documents and other interesting information about the Bonus Expeditionary Force and its impact on American history.

Charles Sheehan-Miles

Charles Sheehan-Miles served as a Abrams Tank Crewman in the 1991 Gulf War and is a former President of the National Gulf War Resource Center and co-founder of Veterans for Common Sense. He is the author of two novels and a forthcoming nonfiction title, Saving the World on $30 A Day. He can be contacted through his website, www.sheehanmiles.com

TO MY WIFE, WILMA,

WHO STOOD BY

W.W. Waters, Commander, BEF

Collaborator’s Note

I have written this story of the Bonus Army as it was told to me by W. W. Waters and from various documentary material which he collected.

Independently, I have checked to my own satisfaction Mr. Waters’s statements, wherever possible, against newspaper accounts and in conversation with Washington newspaper men, with various Washington officials, many of whom are mentioned in this book, and with numerous members of the B.E.F.

William C. White.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Article I.

Constitution of the United States

Introduction

MANY GROUPS of citizens have marched on Washington at one time or another for various purposes but never until June and July, 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Forces camped in the capital did such a movement include so many followers. Sixty thousand to eighty thousand American ex-service men in all were in that army at various times.

I have decided to set down the facts concerning the B.E.F. for many reasons.

The B.E.F. began as a group of men demanding the prepayment of their adjusted service certificates voted by Congress in 1924. It soon became for a vast number of men a means of protest against the economic conditions in our country in 1932, a safety valve for dissatisfaction. It was not recognized as that at this time. It will be remembered as that in American history. The spontaneity which marked its rise and the great popular appeal which brought twenty thousand men to Washington in the first two weeks were something new in American life.

Coming three thousand miles overland with a few hundred of these men as their leader and soon commanding thousands of them, I can tell of the motives and desires which led men to initiate the Bonus March. Their ambitions have been seriously impugned by high official sources. It has been charged that the Bonus March was inspired, sponsored and supported by Communists. It has been said that the marchers intended to foment revolution and to take steps to overthrow our Government. These slurs on honest, American ex-service men must be corrected.

I tell this story for the sake of putting the facts about the B.E.F. on accurate record.

My position gave me an opportunity to see an amazing cross-cut, a close-up view of American life, in contacts with high government officials, in daily meetings with the men in the ranks, and from thousands of letters received. In this record I have tried to describe that view of America to the reader. It is not a class-conscious America. It is a poverty-conscious America, demanding that something be done about it.

The final eviction of the B.E.F. led to one of the most disgraceful episodes in recent American history. The full truth about the steps that led to that eviction and about the event itself must be on record. There was murder done on Black Thursday, July 28th. The methods of eviction on that day revealed a stupidity and a cupidity among Washington politicians that is almost unbelievable. The event itself disclosed to thousands of American citizens who had never before thought particularly about it that the men whom they elect to represent them too often forget who it was that put them in power.

This story is told with no malice or bitterness toward anyone but I evade nothing that is necessary to the truthful recording of this chapter of recent history. This book is not an attack on any political party. I purposely withheld publication until after the elections to prevent anyone from supposing such motives. I have refused and I shall refuse all offers to let any special group profit by my experiences. I sold out to no one. I was broke when I began the Bonus March. I was broke and in debt when I finished with it.

I do not want to include arguments for or against the immediate payment of the Bonus nor pleas for bigger and better Bonus armies. I hope that we shall never need to have another one.

Rather, here is a narrative, historically accurate, of the rise, the history and the dispersal of the B.E.F.—and nothing more.

My own background is typical of the sort of American who joined the B.E.F.

I was born in Oregon, of old American stock, in 1898 and was reared in Idaho. In 1916, restless, with no further West to conquer, I joined the National Guard and went to the Mexican border as a private. The regiment was later divided and one section of it was assigned to the 146th Field Artillery and sent overseas in the winter of 1917. We entered active service at the front in July, 1918. Armistice Day found us still on the firing line. After that we were ordered into Germany as a part of the Army of Occupation. We returned to the United States in June, 1919, and I was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant.

Shortly after my return to civil life my health failed. I spent several months in a hospital under the care of various physicians, for which, by the way, the Government was not asked to pay.

Then, like millions more, I attempted to take up the threads of my life where I had dropped them some three years before. Like many others of my age, I had no occupation or profession to resume. Everything had to be commenced for the first time, and it was a discouraging problem. In the next few years I made numerous serious attempts to get going in some profitable business or position, as a garage mechanic, an automobile salesman, a farmhand, a bakery helper. Each new venture was begun with the same high enthusiasm. Each one ended as an equally dismal failure.

My inability to take root in fertile soil may have been due to the unsettling effects of the War on me. I blamed my failure on environment and felt myself daily getting more and more out of tune with my surroundings.

In 1925 I made a decision which now, in retrospect seems foolish. Eager to begin completely anew, I broke all family and personal ties and left Idaho for some chance-found place, to make a completely new start. Telling no one of my intentions I hitchhiked into the State of Washington and there got a job in the harvest fields. I even used a new name, Bill Kincaid,the first name to flash into my mind when asked, as if to break the more decisively with the past. Under that name I met and married the girl who is now my wife.

During this time I made no particular effort to avoid meeting former acquaintances although I likewise made no effort to seek them out or to notify them of my whereabouts. I had dropped out of sight, in so far as family, home and formerfriends were concerned. I found a job in a cannery near Portland, Oregon, worked up to be assistant superintendent and for once I seemed to have escaped from the failure that had followed me in the past.

I lost that job in December, 1930, due to the depression, and went to Portland in search of employment. There I resumed my real name and later went home, for the first time in five years. But there was no work to be found at home and, a few months later, I came back to Portland. My wife and I had a thousand dollars saved and I felt that we would get along somehow until work was obtained.

Our savings vanished and the hope of work with them during the winter of 1931-1932. In the meantime our personal belongings, one by one, found their way to the pawn shops and by March, 1932, we were not only penniless but had nothing left except a very scanty wardrobe. There were many days that winter when we experienced actual hunger while earnestly trying to find any job that would provide just the necessities of life.

In my ceaseless beating about the city I found family after family in the same general condition or worse. I saw men half clad, in threadbare clothing, pacing the streets in soleless shoes. On their faces was the same look, part of hope, part of bewilderment, as they searched for a chance to earn a few dollars at honest work. I talked with hundreds of these men and found that, with few exceptions, they wanted not charity but work that would enable them to live and to regain their self-respect.

You, who may never have been forced through actual hunger to accept charity or even loans that are given with faint hope of repayment, do not know the double damage that poverty works. It affects the body but, worse, it wrecks self-respect. Charity does keep the body alive after a fashion, but it reduces to a minimum any satisfaction in living; it prevents actual physical suffering but at the expense of mental torture. In time, taken in regular doses, it can have but one ending, the complete annihilation of a man’s faith in himself and the complete rout of the desire that every decent man should have, to improve himself and his position in society. I found that a large percentage of these men in Portland were, like myself, ex-service men. They had fought, so they had been told a few years before, to save the nation; they had fought, it now seemed, only in order to have a place in which to starve.

Among these men there was profound discontent with conditions. There was a ravaging desire to change them but a complete and leaden ignorance of the way to do it. Yet, among these men:hungry, desperate, downcast, there was little or no talk of the need for violent action. It was every man for himself. One can merge one’s individuality in the mass when active, even in wartime when death taps at the shoulders of men, one by one; but starving makes a man think of himself first and foremost. Yet these men were just as loyal to the nation as they had ever been. They were just as patriotic, just as law-abiding as their more fortunate neighbors who had jobs. In other nations similar conditions might lead to revolution. Among these men the very thought, let alone the desire, was never in their minds.

These men did think and talk a great deal about the so-called Bonus. The name Bonus is unfortunate. It is not a gift, as that word implies. It is a payment of money to compensate those men who served in the Army for the difference in pay between that of service men and non-service men in 1918. The bill, asking payment in full of the adjusted compensation for wartime service, was introduced by Representative Patman of Texas and, during the early winter of 1931, was pending in Congress. The majority of veterans were hoping that it would pass.

These men had fallen far down into the valley of despair. Some push was necessary to start them out and up over the hill. Jobs would have provided the best sort of impetus but there were no jobs. The Bonus, a lump sum of money, could act in the same fashion. Debts could be met, doctors’ bills paid, a fast fraying credit renewed, and one man could look another in the eye once more. It mattered not that the Bonus was not due, legally, until 1945. What man, having a promise to pay at a later date would not ask his debtor for it in advance if he believed that the debtor could afford the money and if his own need was not only great but critical? These men felt that the Government had the money. Newspapers, which can always be picked out of trash cans in the parks and public places, published stories of extensions of credit to foreign nations. Headlines told of loans to railroads and to large corporations.

This is not the place to argue the justice or the fallacy of the demand for the immediate payment of the Bonus. The point, continually forgotten, is that the Bonus in these men’s minds became a substitute or a symbol for that long dreamt of new start, a job. These men had nothing to which to look forward except to the shiny shoulders of the man in front of them in the breadline. Whenever I asked these men which they would rather have, the Bonus or a job, the reply was nearly always the same:A job, of course. But where’s a job coming from? I’ve looked every day for over a year and haven’t found one.

When asked what they would do with the Bonus, their answers were alike: First, I’d buy the kids some clothes, then I’d pay the rent, then the grocery bill. And believe me, we’d have at least one good Sunday dinner. Frequently one heard, Well, I could at least pay my debts and then maybe my credit would hold up until I do get a job.

All this could not fail to impress me because it conformed exactly to my own condition and viewpoint.

In Portland at this time there were more than eighteen hundred veterans unemployed who were the heads of families. There was an additional large number of veterans without dependents in the daily breadlines. There were thousands of unemployed people, not veterans. But the city’s charities had to care for all of them and their facilities were overtaxed. The many business and professional men in the city, who had been solicited for contributions again and again, knew it. The hungry and unemployed veterans were not the only ones eager for the payment of the Bonus. Doctors, shopkeepers, druggists